The Unforgiven: Missionaries or Mercenaries? The Tragic Story of the Rebel West Indian Cricketers Who Toured Apartheid South Africa

By Ashley Gray

In the early 80s, 20 West Indian cricketers were paid more than $100,000 each to take part in rebel tours of apartheid South Africa. When they returned home to the Caribbean they were banned for life and shunned by their countrymen. Some turned to drugs, some to God, while others found themselves begging on the streets. This is their untold story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785316968

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Introduction

IT WAS October 1982. Prisoner 220/82, Nelson Mandela, was settling into his new home – a cell in Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison. He had just endured 18 years’ imprisonment in the notorious Robben Island jail. Meanwhile, Hollywood superstar Liza Minelli was flying into Johannesburg for an 11-show engagement in Sun City.

On arrival at Jan Smuts Airport, she was mobbed by fans and journalists alike. The local newspaper couldn’t contain its glee. ‘Eat your heart out New York’, it bragged, as Minelli ‘swept into her hotel like a typhoon’. Unsurprisingly, the same reporter made no comparison between the room Ms Minelli occupied and the one Mandela was forced to endure, 870 miles away on the outskirts of Cape Town.

Minelli wasn’t the first celebrity to find the lure of the krugerrand stronger than any ethical concerns about visiting the apartheid stronghold. British singers Shirley Bassey, Elton John and Rod Stewart were hot on her stiletto heels, while tennis champion Billie Jean King declared ahead of an international tournament in the Transvaal capital, ‘I’ve been very keen to come to South Africa for a long time.’

For those big names, and the local white audiences who craved their visits, that spring must have seemed reassuringly normal – provided they turned a blind eye to the ugly reality within.

Furious white ratepayers in Durban, railing against black citizens having access to public toilets, alleging they would spread venereal disease. A gang of baton-wielding whites in Ermelo, attacking black guests at a Holiday Inn dinner-dance after learning of an interracial tryst. Frantic parliamentary debates over new influx controls, known as the Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Bill, which aimed to deny Africans the right to live in cities.

Racial discrimination buttressed by apartheid – the enforced separation of minority groups – was a feature of everyday life. It ensured the minority white population controlled the economic and social levers of the country.

But in a post-colonial world, South Africa’s version of normal was becoming increasingly repugnant to the global community. Fierce condemnation gathered pace. Suspension from the United Nations (UN) and Olympic Games, sporting boycotts and trade and cultural sanctions isolated the republic, gnawing at the fragile self-esteem of its white citizens. By hosting a steady stream of international pop stars, entertainers and sportspeople at its gold-funded stages and fields, a people under siege could present a business-as-usual facade to the outside world.

But playing sport in the pariah republic was now a tug-of-war between money and conscience that fewer were willing to tolerate. In 1977, Commonwealth heads of government drafted the Gleneagles Agreement, which discouraged all sporting links with South Africa. Three years later, the UN drew up an ongoing blacklist of those who had played there.

The Springboks had been locked out of world competition since 1970 as cricket’s controlling body, the International Cricket Council (ICC), demanded an end to segregated teams and integration on the pitch.

The likes of master batsman Graeme Pollock, dashing opener Barry Richards, and seasoned Test all-rounders Mike Procter and Eddie Barlow were confined to domestic or county competition in England.

The captain of that roll-call of Springboks legends was Ali Bacher. A doctor by profession, he became a successful administrator of Transvaal, transforming it into the feared ‘mean machine’ that dominated South African provincial cricket in the 1980s. In 1982, he sat on the board of the South African Cricket Union (SACU). The previous year he’d pulled off a major coup, luring West Indian left-hander Alvin Kallicharran – a man whose brown skin deemed him a second-class citizen in South Africa’s racial hierarchy – as their overseas professional. For his enterprise, the 66-Test veteran earned a Test ban from the West Indies Cricket Board of Control (WICBC).

Throughout the 1970s, South African cricket had attempted to reinvent itself by embracing non-racial selection policies. However, most black, coloured and Indian players were aligned to the rival South African Cricket Board (SACB), which refused to cooperate with the dominant SACU while apartheid was still in place. Its leader Hassan Howa rightly pegged integration as a form of window dressing designed solely to appease white liberals and convince the ICC that the Springboks were worthy of readmittance to the Test arena. The ICC wasn’t convinced either. Pressure from anti-apartheid campaigners was now so intense that resuming Test contact with South Africa would have brought world cricket to its knees and created a racial schism between white and non-white playing nations.

With the door shut firmly on a return and fears the game would wither without further international stimulus, the chequebook became the SACU’s sole tool of survival. Bolstered by a generous tax break that allowed sponsors to claim back almost 90 per cent of their outlay for ‘international events’, it was near enough to a government-sanctioned blank cheque.

Early in 1982, a bunch of over-the-hill and fringe English Test players were paid close to £40,000 each to participate in an eight-match tour of the outlier republic. Despite a three-year Test ban and howls of protest from black-consciousness groups in South Africa and the left side of British politics – Shadow Environment Secretary Gerald Kaufman said the players were ‘selling themselves for blood-covered krugerrands’ – the tour was a minor success. It set the template for a further half-dozen.

Ali Bacher had little to do with that spectacle. He had his eyes trained on a bigger prize: the all-conquering West Indies side. But Caribbean involvement – convincing black men to play in a country that systematically discriminated against people of their own colour – was no certainty, and fearing another summer without international competition, a Sri Lankan rebel side was quickly cobbled together for the pleasure of Pollock, Richards and Procter. That they were substandard surprised nobody; what was more significant was the warm reception they received. To interested watchers, it showed that ‘non-white’ sportsmen could tour the republic without incident.

Back on the subcontinent it was a different story. Slapped with a 25-year cricket ban by the Sri Lanka Board of Control, the 14 players now had more money than they could have expected to earn in a lifetime of cricket, but employers no longer wanted to be associated with men it was perceived had shamed a nation. The clubs where they had made their name gave them a wide berth. They were alienated from the sport they loved and the people who supported them. ‘There’s kind of an invisible difference between them and the others’, a Colombo newspaper editor reported. It was a telling observation with haunting overtones for future rebel tourists.

While SACU president Joe Pamensky, an avuncular but hard-nosed Johannesburg businessman, took care of the Sri Lankan tour, Bacher pursued his Caribbean quarry. The West Indies were cricket titans. Reigning World Cup champions, they played with a swagger and charisma that thrilled spectators and critics alike. They were cricket’s number one drawcard, but they were also vulnerable to opportunistic forces. Unlike first-world England or Australia, financial opportunities for West Indies cricketers in retirement were limited; there were few lucrative commentary positions and the economically challenged Caribbean was in no position to support them. It was a situation recognised by captain Clive Lloyd in a paper presented to West Indies’ governments in 1982, warning of the spectre of South African raids:

‘Several West Indies players ... many who do not have a secure playing future when their playing days are over ... may be tempted to respond favourably to these offers. If members of what might be considered the West Indies first and second elevens were to give in to the considerable temptations that could be offered, the implications for both West Indies and world cricket could be grave.’

At that point, West Indies players were paid less than a thousand dollars a Test match. Lloyd suggested a stipend of US$20,000 to US$30,000 a year to keep the sharks at bay.

While the authorities dithered, Bacher struck. It was on one of many fruitless trips to London to convince the ICC that South Africa should be welcomed back to Test cricket, that Bacher snuck away to meet Colin Croft in Manchester. The intimidating West Indian paceman was carrying a back injury that threatened his career, and Dr Bacher offered him treatment in South Africa and a cheque rumoured to be in excess of US$100,000. He also met with Malcolm Marshall and Sylvester Clarke, two Barbados fast bowlers on the fringes of West Indies selection; the very men Lloyd feared would be targets. They were interested.

When he returned to Barbados after the 1982 county season ended, it was Surrey-contracted Clarke who gave the business card of one of Bacher’s associates to retired paceman Gregory Armstrong. Armstrong was a perfect choice for the conspirators. His career had petered out in the late 1970s but at his best he’d been good enough to open the bowling with Andy Roberts for the West Indies President’s XI and hostile enough to break Bernard Julien’s arm in a net session. He’d reinvented himself as a shrewd businessman, organising the first day-night cricket tournament on the island, sponsored by Cockspur Rum.

Armstrong immediately contacted Bacher with a plan to execute the doctor’s vision. Bacher told Armstrong that without Viv Richards or any of the ‘big names’, the tours would bomb. ‘I’ll have you know that any of these guys here could replace Richards or Holding or any of the others,’ Armstrong shot back. But that didn’t stop him contacting some of those big names.

Joel Garner, the giant Barbados quick, was one of them. A feared member of the West Indies Test team with 124 Test wickets, he would add instant cachet to any rebel side. ‘It was about US$350,000 a year,’ Garner says of the offer Armstrong made him. ‘But at the end of the day I said, Am I going to take their $350,000 to end my career? I said, You got to be joking. I can put away ten years of cricket. This is foolishness. But the money wasn’t the catch. I said to them clearly, I will not be an honorary white to go to South Africa to play cricket ... while the other blacks and coloureds were suffering.’

Even so, he made sure to check with the Barbados Prime Minister Tom Adams whether potential rebels would be banned from re-entering the island. ‘He said, You’re a Barbadian. If you go to South Africa, no one can stop you coming and going to Barbados as you like. I said I wasn’t going; I was just checking what the feeling of the people was.’

As a signatory to the Gleneagles Agreement, Adams’s Barbados Labour Party government was strenuously opposed to sporting contact with South Africa, a position echoed across a British Caribbean built on the horrors of slavery. Opposition to apartheid was particularly trenchant in Jamaica, which, in 1957, was one of the first countries to enforce a trade embargo against South Africa. Former Prime Minister Michael Manley had built an international reputation as a warrior against racial segregation, going so far as to urge an air, sea and land boycott in the UN.

In Guyana, the government led by President Forbes Burnham had been prepared to sacrifice a Test match against England rather than allow English seamer Robin Jackman, an occasional coach in South Africa, into the country, such was the level of anti-apartheid sentiment. And Trinidad, scene of the Black Power uprising in 1970 that sought to alleviate Afro-Caribbean disadvantage, boasted a militant union movement that successfully orchestrated port boycotts of South African goods.

In this highly charged atmosphere, Bacher and Armstrong strove to keep negotiations under wraps. They devised a series of codes to keep telephone conversations secret as player recruitment continued at a frantic pace. Pre-internet, Bacher consulted Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack to confirm the credentials of players he’d never seen in action. Little-known names such as Alvin Greenidge, Franklyn Stephenson, Albert Padmore, Ezra Moseley, Emmerson Trotman, Richard Austin and Everton Mattis, complemented fading Test men Lawrence Rowe, Bernard Julien, Derick Parry, Collis King and David Murray.

Croft was in, along with Johannesburg resident Kallicharran. So too was Clarke, every county batsman’s worst nightmare, but forever destined to be a West Indies fill-in.

What united this disaffected mob of peripheral and slightly past-their-use-by-date cricketers was a belief that the West Indies side was a closed shop. Its successes meant that captain Clive Lloyd wielded unprecedented power. Individualists, eccentrics, rogues ... many of the rebel squad didn’t fit the conservative Lloyd mould. Even some of Lloyd’s own men were wavering. Desmond Haynes had only just established himself as Gordon Greenidge’s opening partner, while fellow Bajan Malcolm Marshall was still banging at the door of the exclusive West Indies pace club. The SACU’s generous lump sum, in the region of $US100,000 for two seasons, would set them both up for life.

They were so close to joining the tours that David Simmons, the chairman of Barbados National Sports Council, felt compelled to phone them in Melbourne, where they were playing grade cricket. ‘I told them ultimately they would have to live with themselves,’ he says. ‘They’d be jeopardising their future.’

Sports minister Vic Johnson echoed his view. ‘There is no price for which self-respect or human integrity can ever be bought,’ he railed.

But it was Barbados, the home of the legendary ‘three Ws’ – Sir Frank Worrell, Sir Everton Weekes and Sir Clyde Walcott - and, one writer quipped, the ‘three Cs’ – conservatism, Christianity and cricket – that would supply nearly half the rebel contingent. There was even a report that its favourite son, Sir Garfield Sobers, was being lured to manage the rebels, though it was quickly rejected by his wife.

Up until the players boarded their flights, no one knew for sure whether the tours were going ahead. On the morning of Tuesday, 11 January 1983, cricket commentator Reds Perreira was driving to a practice session at Kensington Oval. A familiar presence on Voice of Barbados, he was reporting on the home side’s preparation for its first Shell Shield match in ten days’ time against the Leeward Islands. But as he stopped at a pedestrian crossing, he heard a tap on his car window and saw one of the most revered figures in West Indies cricket – a man whose name Perreira has sworn never to reveal. ‘Rebel team going to South Africa,’ the man whispered. ‘Do your homework.’

It was potentially the biggest scoop of his career, so he called a friend at British West Indies Airways (BWIA) and asked her to check fights to Miami, one of the first stops for any international travel out of Barbados. He had to give her the name of someone he thought the rebel tour organisers would target; someone near enough to West Indies selection but far enough from ever making it. He suggested the hard-hitting Barbados batsman Emmerson Trotman. It worked; he was flying out the next day, along with seven other Bajan first-class cricketers.

‘I went on air at about 1.05pm and broke the story,’ Perreira says. ‘I didn’t want the BBC or Australia or anyone else to break it. This was a Caribbean story. But I didn’t call out any names because I didn’t want reporters and photographers at their house.’

The next day, Grantley Adams International Airport was packed with drama as Perreira sweated on the rebels’ arrival, knowing he would be made to look a fool if they didn’t show. When none of them boarded the proposed BWIA flight, he began to fret. A baggage handler he knew told him he’d seen Trotman’s cousin, former Test opener Alvin Greenidge, rolling a suitcase to the American Airlines check-in. Perreira pounced on the American Airlines manager, who confirmed the rebels’ booking.

The first plane had been a decoy. But the drama wasn’t over. A van driven by 11-Test fast bowler Sylvester Clarke roared into the car park, tyres screeching. Six more international cricketers climbed out. The last to embark was two-Test off-spinner Albert Padmore. Perreira caught him on the tarmac. ‘I knew him well,’ he says. ‘I said, Paddy, are you going to South Africa? His answer was, No comment. Then I asked, Why are you going to South Africa? No comment again. Then the ramp came down and they let him on.’

A pattern of deception and denial characterised the lead-in to the rebel extravaganza as the SACU sought to confuse the world’s press and take the pressure off their trailblazing recruits. In Kingston, Jamaica, batting great Lawrence Rowe and bowler Colin Croft seemingly gave assurances they had snubbed Bacher’s pots of rand. WICBC president Allan Rae claimed that ‘sportsmen have no respect for these cloak and dagger figures with their wallets full of money’, and boasted that the much-loved Rowe ‘was disgusted his name was being bandied around with the suggestion he would forfeit his pride for Krugerrands’. Within days Croft and Rowe, captain designate, would board a plane bound for Miami en route to Johannesburg.

Back in South Africa, SACU president Pamensky issued a statement abandoning the tour because press leaks were scaring off signings. It was hokum. He’d employed the same tactic before the Sri Lanka tour. But he wasn’t done. As the rebels criss-crossed international airspace, the SACU leaked a story that nine of them were stranded in Madrid. But none had ever set foot in Spain.

The first to nudge South African terra firma were the Jamaicans Richard Austin, a two-Test all-rounder, and Everton Mattis, a four-Test batsman. They both hailed from Kingston’s ghettos. En route, the string bean Mattis told a London reporter: ‘Look, I am not supporting the apartheid regime, I don’t agree with it. It’s my living and I’ve got five children to support.’

White South Africa didn’t care what his motivations were. The Rand Daily Mail, Johannesburg’s liberal-leaning newspaper, splashed with ‘15 cricket rebels defy the world’ and ‘Cricket’s impossible dream comes true’.

Ali Bacher and Joe Pamensky had pulled off the most daring cricket heist since World Series Cricket (WSC).

* * *

At Jan Smuts Airport, vice-captain Kallicharran, already into his second season with Transvaal, and according to Joe Pamensky a key figure in the tour’s conception, greeted his jet-lagged teammates as three black protesters with anti-tour slogans pinned to their chests stood in silence in the concourse. News of the tour had barely registered in the townships.

The Rand Daily Mail editorialised: ‘We are pleased to see the West Indians here and look forward to a stimulating sporting encounter ... it will we hope ... poke a few more holes in apartheid; help to demolish the ugly attitudes that bolster an ugly system.’

The reaction in the Caribbean was swift and merciless. The WICBC slapped each of the rebels with lifelong Test and firstclass cricket bans. Jamaican Minister of Youth and Community Development Errol Anderson vowed never to let his country’s rebels utilise their ‘blood money’, promising to purge Jamaica of their ‘despicable qualities’. Trinidad Foreign Minister Basil Ince was more measured but equally as damning: ‘They are mercenaries fighting for the cause of apartheid ... on the backs and blood of black people of South Africa.’

Perhaps the most surprising attack came from Roy Fredericks, a 59-Test veteran, and ex-team-mate of many of the rebels. He’d been a beneficiary of WSC and knew the hardships that several of his old friends faced. But in his role as Minister for Youth, Sport and Culture in the Guyanese government, he suggested they should ‘not cause further discomfort to the West Indian population by attempting to live among us’. St Lucia and Grenada made sure they couldn’t, barring them from ever entering their islands.

Fredericks wasn’t the only former colleague to condemn the rebels. West Indies captain Clive Lloyd’s worst fears had been realised. He called the tours ‘an affront to the black man throughout the world’. Fast bowler Michael Holding and batting great Viv Richards had knocked back astronomical sums offered them to join the Bacher circus. Holding couldn’t control his anger, ‘If they were offered enough money, they would probably agree to wear chains.’ Richards understood his friends’ motives but insisted he would ‘rather die than lay down my dignity’ the way they had done. But some thought their criticism was over the top. It was easier, they said, for established stars Holding, Lloyd and Richards to take the moral high ground when their tenure in the West Indies set-up was much more secure.

Barbados-born Roland Butcher, the first black man to play for England, and himself a target of Mike Gatting’s doomed 1989 rebel side, saw the problem of playing moral policeman. ‘They were scathing but the question would be: had they been in a similar position to the others, would they be so scathing? They were coming from a privileged background. If they’d been in the same situation and taken the same stance that would have been fantastic, but you will never know.’

Black South Africa wasn’t so equivocal. The Azanian People’s Organisation claimed that the West Indians had ‘soiled themselves by flirting with racism, white domination and black dispossession’. Gibson Thula, chief urban representative of the KwaZulu Homeland, invited the tourists to inspect the substandard facilities available to black cricketers in the Cape Town townships of Nyanga, Gugulethu and Langa. Hassan Howa of the SACB was unyielding in his belief that there could be ‘no normal sport in an abnormal society’. All of them called for the rebels to return home while they still had some dignity intact.

Public condemnation from Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) was more muted – but with good reason: it had been banned since 1960 and reporting its leaders’ opinions was a jailable offence.

What particularly irked Holding and Richards was the idea that the rebels would be accorded ‘honorary white’ status in order to travel to places and socialise in restaurants, hotels and bars that were normally off limits to black and coloured people. To a man, the rebels deny they ever signed documents that transformed them into honorary whites, but there’s no question that they were afforded privileges the native population could only dream of. It lent the tour a bubble-like feel as they whizzed around the republic in five-star comfort and style.

Al Gilkes of Barbados’s The Nation newspaper was the only Caribbean journalist to accompany the tourists. He saw through the deceit. ‘I was very close to the guys,’ he says. ‘They had latitude to cross the colour bar. I don’t think they knew they were in an unreal world. Every night in the hotels, white girls were in there partying and sleeping with them, in a country where cohabitation was banned. Jewellery stores would be opened on Sundays when they were normally closed, and the guys were able to shop at one-tenth of the price. On the planes everyone was sitting next to each other regardless of colour; there were black and white people in the international hotels they stayed at.’

It’s little wonder it was reported post-tour that when one of them was asked what he knew of Nelson Mandela, he replied, ‘I don’t know him. He didn’t play against us.’

At his first press conference, captain Lawrence Rowe was understandably nervous. ‘Obviously we are feeling a bit jittery,’ he said. ‘I just hope the South African people will treat us and love us in the manner we would like to be treated.’

Away from the charged political debate, ‘calypso fever’ gripped white South Africa in a way even the tour’s most strident opponents could never have foreseen. It prompted Graeme Pollock’s brother, retired Test all-rounder Peter Pollock, to declare: ‘This is the best thing to ever have happened to South African cricket.’

Spectators agreed. Grounds were packed as crowds flocked to witness history and the novelty of elite black sportsmen in action against their white counterparts. Pitch invasions were commonplace, and at stumps star-struck boys sporting tour-branded T-shirts begged the West Indies squad for autographs and mementoes. Collis King, the slashing Barbados all-rounder, was their number one target. ‘They all wanted to have their picture taken with him,’ Gilkes says. ‘He was the superstar. The original Chris Gayle.

‘They were worshipping him. You couldn’t help but notice how they responded to these people they would normally see as inferior.’

Support for the tourists came from all corners of the republic – even rugby-loving Afrikaners. The Ficksburg Afrikaanse Sakekamer, a regional business association, sent 200 rand to the SACU to ‘convey our heartfelt thanks and appreciation to your board and to the West Indies cricketers for what they have done for sport in South Africa’.

Brut 33 wasn’t so impartial. Its ads featured blond fast bowler Garth Le Roux reclining in full-on hunk mode under the slogan ‘Take on the world with the great smell of Brut’, wishing the Springboks – it would be another decade before the apartheid-era nickname was replaced with the less controversial Proteas – every success in their encounter with Rowe’s rebels.

Even record label EMI bought into the hype, releasing The Cricket Song, a steel band tune by novelty act Albie Dubbelyoo and the Fielders.

The Rand Daily Mail greeted the second ‘Test’ at the Wanderers in Johannesburg with a four-page colour wrap-around ‘telling you all you need to know about the ’Bok and West Indies stars and their tactics’ and set up a cricket score hotline for the match. It received more than 8,000 calls on the first day.

Supermarket chain Pick ’n Pay urged fans to ‘stock up on the way to the Wanderers’ with cheap cans of Coca-Cola and cheese wedges, while authorities warned those same fans not to bring cooler bags because there would be no room for them in the jampacked grandstands.

They should have told them to cover their refreshments – medicos reported 15 spectators were stung by bees attracted by the sweet scent of soft drinks.

* * *

The rebels won the hearts and minds of a sizeable chunk of white South Africa, sometimes in spite of their own prejudices. When Port Elizabeth’s Afrikaner mayor welcomed the West Indians to his city, the Sunday Times quoted a bemused white businessman at the city hall function: ‘I never thought I’d see the day when we’d all be turning out at a civic reception in honour of 15 black sportsmen from overseas.’

A familiar argument put forward by the tour’s supporters was that seeing a successful West Indian side would encourage greater black cricket participation at grass-roots level. But did black people see them? The rebels attended a few coaching clinics in townships, which Gilkes says were more about promotion and propaganda than genuine attempts to engage. Film footage and photographs show that crowds in the partially desegregated public stands were predominantly male, white and often shirtless, with a smattering of Indian and ‘coloured’ youths. But in the same Sunday Times story, correspondent Eric Marsden noted that the Border tour game in East London had ‘more black spectators than had ever been seen there’.

The truth was that cricket was still the white man’s domain and football the game of the townships. On the second day of the gripping Johannesburg ‘Test’, the front page of the township edition of the Rand Daily Mail ignored the action at Wanderers, and focused on the impending BP Cup semi-final between Iwisa Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates at Orlando Stadium in Soweto. Over 16,000 had savoured the rebels’ play; more than 40,000 were expected for the soccer clash the following day.

Makhaya Ntini, the first black man to take 300 Test wickets for South Africa, is often cited as an example of the positive effect that the West Indies XI had in inspiring indigenous talent. But he was only five when the first tour kicked off. ‘When we grew up there was no TV,’ he says of his childhood in Mdingi, a small village in the Cape Province. ‘There would have been nowhere to watch them.’

He’s unsure whether the rebel tours spawned many black imitators but maintains the West Indies were admired as athletes by Africans, even if it wasn’t their sport of choice. ‘Our fathers were fans of the West Indies; black South Africans supported them anyway, because they were originally from Africa. We loved West Indian culture.’

* * *

If white South Africa enjoyed an orgy of self-congratulation over its unexpected love affair with the Caribbean tourists, the interim period leading up to the second tour was a reminder that race relations within the republic were still rotten to the core. In a move interpreted as progressive by most local commentators, white voters approved a change to the constitution which gave ‘Indians’ and ‘Coloureds’ their own parliamentary chambers and a direct voice in South African affairs. Unbelievably, the majority black population was left out.

In Jamaica, the rebels were heartened by a poll in the national Gleaner newspaper which indicated 68 per cent support for the South African tours, many of the respondents revealing they would have acted in the same way as their tainted countrymen. But the results were tempered somewhat by the knowledge only 34 per cent of those interviewed knew what apartheid was.

In South Africa, Bacher and the SACU weren’t sitting on their hands. Aware the white sporting public would not tolerate a bland re-run of the first tour, they sought to strengthen the West Indies squad by raiding Lloyd’s world-beaters. Except they were no longer that – at least not in the one-day format. In one of the great sporting upsets, they had gifted the 1983 World Cup Final to India. Bacher swooped on the disaffected losers. He snapped up classy Guyanese batsman Faoud Bacchus, but he craved a more recognisable name. In his autobiography, Marshall Arts, Malcolm Marshall, by now an indispensable cog in the West Indies pace machine, says Bacher met him at a Wimpy Bar in Southampton and tabled a US$1 million deal. When Marshall rebuffed him, a shocked Bacher spilt his cup of coffee down the front of his shirt. Instead, a clean-shirted Bacher would have to settle for Marshall’s friend Hartley Alleyne, another product of the famed Barbados pace laboratory, and Monte Lynch, a promising, England-qualified Guyanese batter. The Jamaican trio of Richard Austin, Herbert Chang and Ray Wynter – the latter two were added to the first tour as injury cover – were axed.

The second campaign, a long, 10-week, 19-game affair, started in mid-November 1983. Wicketkeeper David Murray had endured a tough first campaign – Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser had threatened to cancel his visa, stranding him from his wife and baby girl – but he was now relaxed and optimistic enough to declare his compatriots in the Caribbean were more interested in the rebels’ fortunes than the progress of Clive Lloyd’s official Test side in India. ‘I think our people feel that our official Test team is now becoming a second-string side because some of our best players have been banned for coming to South Africa. I personally have no doubt that the West Indies’ best fast bowlers are the ones in South Africa. At this moment, Colin Croft, Sylvester Clarke, Ezra Moseley and Franklyn Stephenson are the best we’ve got.’

Money and sponsorship tensions threatened to derail the summer. The tourists wanted a larger portion of the revenue they’d generated through record crowd receipts. With the tour in the balance, an improved deal was brokered but the goodwill between the SACU and its prized charges was permanently stained. Re-badged as the Yellow Pages One Day Series and the National Panasonic ‘Tests’, attendances remained high for the limited-over day-night games but dipped in the longer format because of over-exposure, and in the first Test at Durban, a featherbed pitch. However, the cricket was still top class. The West Indies’ pace battery, led by Clarke, Moseley and new recruit Alleyne, a man Geoffrey Boycott maintained would command a spot in most Test teams, inspired a 2-1 ‘Test’ and 4-2 one-day series victory.

The injured Croft’s major contribution was getting himself thrown off a whites-only carriage in Cape Town. The incident provoked international outrage and anti-apartheid activists again ramped up their calls for a tour boycott.

But the rebels had an unlikely ally in world record-holding 1,500m runner Sydney Maree. He complained that an unfortunate side effect of the sporting boycott against South Africa was that it hurt black sportsmen like himself. He was already in the process of applying for US citizenship.

Meanwhile, European and American golfing greats Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo and Fuzzy Zoeller teed off in the Million Dollar Golf Challenge at Sun City, and Argentine Guillermo Vilas slugged it out with American Vitas Gerulaitis in the 1983 South African Open. It galled that these rich white sportsmen, unaffected by the Gleneagles Agreement, were able to flit in and out of South Africa with little condemnation, while the West Indians were universally slammed. It was hard enough being born with the wrong skin colour into second-world poverty, let alone being forced to wear criticism for trying to escape it.

It was only when they returned to the Caribbean and the realisation that the life they had once cherished was gone forever, that the gravity of their transgressions kicked in. No one would escape the barbs, the cries of ‘race traitor’ and ‘honorary white’. Cashed

Reviews for The Unforgiven

[miaculpa-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For years I have demanding a book about the West Indies Rebel side to South Africa in the 1980s and finally it has arrived. Covering the lead up to the tour, the tour itself and the repercussions, in chapters covering each player. It is sobering to see the very different routes that players have taken since the tour; Richard Austin drug abuse and death, David Murray drugs and alcohol, Herbert Chang mental illness, to those successful businessmen like Lawrence Rowe, Faoud Bacchus and Franklyn Stephenson.Much is made by the Rebels of their opposition to apartheid and how they toured to fight apartheid rather than the money. I’m not sure their arguments hold water but then that is between them and their conscience.